


Three Nights in Hateno Town

by Kanthia



Series: every flying whale is the wind fish [6]
Category: The Legend of Zelda & Related Fandoms, The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild
Genre: F/M, NPC perspective, Worldbuilding
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-22
Updated: 2019-04-22
Packaged: 2020-01-23 21:43:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,596
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18558448
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kanthia/pseuds/Kanthia
Summary: A stranger arrives to town, underfed and overburdened and smelling like he'd spent the last hundred years sleeping in the woods, and changes everything.





	Three Nights in Hateno Town

_"If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe"_  
_(Carl Sagan)_ **  
**

**01.**

Well, it’s not like they _don’t_ get travelers in Hateno, yeah? Every now and then there’s a schmuck stupid enough to saddle a horse or unhitch a boat and make for Kakariko or Lurelin or (goddesses forgive Hylians for their foolishness) Tabantha for trade goods, or brave the hills around the Zora’s Domain for a peek at a distance of whatever the hell it is that lives in the reservoir, or if they’re _really_ stupid, go treasure-hunting in Hyrule Castle. Easiest way to disappoint your mama is to get your head chopped off by a Moblin while trespassing in the Calamity’s basement, but damn if those gems the lucky few brought home weren’t a sight to behold.

So people kept travelling beyond the boundaries of doors and walls and common sense, and sometimes they came back. Sometimes the people that dropped in from out of town weren’t locals, either -- an obnoxiously shifty Kakariko out for what they called _border patrol_ as if they could possibly be on the lookout for something less obvious than a Lizalfos; or Gerudo on a walkabout out looking for her husband or wife; or a very, very lost rockman; or one of the denizens of a far-flung stable, who’d peer around at the civilization of Hateno like it was something poisonous.

Yeah, not that they don’t get strangers -- strangers are just very odd people, putting their life on the line just to walk over hundred-year-old ruins, and you don’t usually see them more than once. When they roll into town you show them around, offer them a bath and dinner, but you don’t get to know them too well. Whenever there’s a meeting, a parting is sure to follow, and all that, and all that.

So -- _the_ stranger. Rides into town uncomfortably high in the saddle of a half-broken steed looking like the most bizarre intersection of heroic and pathetic: tired, underfed, overburdened, but pleased as punch with himself. Stinks so bad the goddesses above can probably smell him, stinks like he’d spent the last hundred years sleeping out there in the wilds, stinks so much that Prima heats up some bathwater before he even heads into the inn. Except that he _doesn’t_ go straight to the inn like a normal person. Instead he disappears into the metal hut that had appeared one day by the abandoned house atop Firly Pond. When he emerges it’s glowing blue -- like the tower out by Lake Jarrah. Then he buys some clothing from the armor shop, and Sophie is so rattled by the experience of exchanging rupees with him that she doesn’t say a word for the rest of the day. He buys arrows and rice, listens patiently to Uma ramble on about her grandmother’s stories about how things were _before_ , ambles up the hill to the abandoned laboratory south of Retsam Forest.

“Cutie,” Ivee says.  
  
“Weirdo,” Senna says.  
  
“Both,” Koyin says. “Kinda scrawny for my tastes, but I guess some people are into that.”

Prima is not into that, thanks for asking. He has that feral look about him, like a kid who’ll break your heart and then go off and die in a ditch, never mind the smell.

A plume of smoke eases out of the laboratory, and one of the kids catches the stranger running down towards the beach, where he makes his presence known by bashing in the heads of a bunch of monsters who’d been feasting on Koyin’s sheep. Only after dark does he finally make his way to the Great Ton Pu, dragging in blood and guts and sand and who knows what else, looking for a bath and a bed.

“Took you long enough,” Prima says, reheating the bathwater. “If you’d have dropped by earlier, we could’ve had it hot for you in time.”  
  
He offers a noncommittal shrug.

 _Keep your damn secrets, then,_ she thinks, as he’s off to the communal cooking pot to make his dinner -- though he’ll have to make a personal portion, since he’s missed the tail end of the regular meal. Throws some rice and mushrooms in with a bit of water, and Prima supposes it’ll do for some half-starved kid that the woods spat out. He rolls it up and eats, of course, with his dirty hands.

The bathwater is hot when he returns, licking the salt off his fingers, and she pours it into a barrel behind the inn. Doesn’t even have time to turn her back before he starts stripping off his shirt.

He's sunburnt and and wind-chapped and has the most curious collection of small circular scars on his shoulders and chest, and Prima considers looking away before realizing that if he’s not embarrassed, then she doesn’t need to be. He makes small noises of contentment, the sound of someone unused to comfort; she hands him soap and a horsehair brush, and he scrubs himself red.

His name is Link, and when she asks where he’s from he just gestures vaguely outwards. He’s a traveller from the west. He has things to do. The sunset fireflies come out in force; blue fire dots the hill to the north; the tower by Lake Jarrah throws light onto a warm and easy night; in the distance the ocean murmurs, seductive and unassuming, just beyond the boundaries of the known world. She shows Link to his room and he blinks several times at the sight of a cotton-stuffed mattress before nodding his head. She takes her leave.

She dreams that night of standing on a great plateau staring at a magnificent metal bird hanging heavy heavy heavy in the sky to the north and she has something she desperately needs to do but she has forgotten everything, even her own name.

As per his request she wakes him at dawn, and he is off to wherever he must go.

 

* * *

 

**02.**

The Hatenan diet is mostly rice and vegetables with mushrooms and herbs and boar meat hunted at great personal risk in the Midla and Ginner Woods, prepared and eaten out of the communal soup-pot that sits on the hill south of Firly Pond. It’s a filling if somewhat bland diet augmented with fruit and eggs and cow’s or sheep’s milk and the occasional ingredients brought into town by travellers -- fish that comes up the Necluda Sea from Lurelin Village, salt, forest herbs, bee honey, and on the very rare occasion something fancy and exotic from far beyond civilization. When Prima was eight years old a traveller had brought a handful of dried spices down from Death Mountain and had thrown it in the pot with meat and rice; everyone in town gorged themselves on the thing called _curry_ , and if Prima’s throat still burns in remembrance, it is a fond memory.

Way up to the northwest, where the birdmen lived, rumour had it that the staple grain is a type of grass called wheat. It’s a strange plant that thrives in the cool and dry, unsuited to the humidity in Hateno, and really not useful for much -- you can boil it for an hour and then throw it in a soup to make it thicker, and that’s about it. There had been talk about cultivating the soil in the Walnots, or even going as far north as the Lanayru Ruins, to grow a bit of wheat, but the danger far outweighed the benefits. Any Hylian can live on rice alone.

Rhodes had nonetheless taken an interest in bird grains, learned from travellers over the years that up in the Akkalas the Hylians mashed their wheat with salt and water and cooked it into loaves called bread. Despite numerous attempts he'd never produced anything even approaching edible. His dreams of bread were eventually stashed next to other impossible things, like expanding the village, or reclaiming Hyrule Castle.

This properly maintained stability was, of course, thrown all out of whack by the stranger, who spent the next few weeks popping into town at the most random of times, letting the village kids nick themselves on his weapons, trading rupees with Bolson, and, while Manny stared intently through the window of the Great Ton Pu, showing Prima his cricket collection.

Something is changing, some imperceptible shift which, over time, became the new norm: travellers started showing up more often, the fishing boats from Lurelin became more frequent, the haze over the Zora’s Domain dissipated, and visitors told stories of the Hero-Prince Sidon as if he was someone they’d met, not just a hundred-year-old fairy tale about an eleven foot tall fishman. The inn was busy every day, the communal soup tasted of spice or seafood or cane sugar; the atmosphere in town became, on any given day, a little more jovial than subdued. People talked about tomorrow like it was something to look forward to, not just another same-old-same-old punctuated by the recurrence of the Blood Moon.

Prima doesn’t like it. The way of life in Hateno had been unchanged for nearly one hundred years, and now everything was different.

So of course this all comes to head on a warm and unseasonably dry day when one of the kids yells down from his vantage point that _he’s here, he’s here,_ because the stranger has popped up seemingly out of the blue at the metal dome near Firly Pond, and all the kids race to see what weird sharp object he’s brought them today.

(It’s a handful of glowing blue arrowheads. He sends them, whooping and hollering, down the hill into the Grimmer Woods to find him wood for the shafts and feathers for the fletching.)

When all the kids are gone, the stranger ambles off to find Reede.

All that ambling! Thinks he can waltz his way into town and teach the kids that they can go play pick-up-sticks in the woods. When Prima was a little girl, the first and last rule was _never leave the town walls_ \-- she’d play this game with her friends, poking their feet beyond that boundary, seeing how many toes they could get outside before an adult caught them and gave them a tongue-lashing about losing their minds.

And yet --

\-- Well, nobody had _died_ yet. Link had taught all the kids how to make wooden swords and shields, how to fend off Bokoblins, and they were actually pretty good at it. It would be easier to hate him if he was a real asshole -- if that ambling was mere posturing -- but when you got to know him you realized that he was quiet, easygoing, self-possessed, thoughtful, even a bit charming. Good with his hands. Helpful. Liked to take things slow, but could work with urgency if needed. Had a tendency to show up at exactly the right moment. He’d saved Koyin’s sheep, bought Sophie’s armor, helped with the harvest, paid for the restoration of the old building out back, and maybe Prima’s life was a little easier once he’d convinced Manny to stop fawning over her.

So she’s not in the _worst_ mood that evening when every kid comes back in one piece, proudly showing off the new additions to their collection of Bokoblin horns. Prima starts heating the bathwater, the inn almost full, as usual, and she heads to the soup-pot to make her dinner.

Rhodes and Link are there, crouching low over the fire. When she gets a little closer she sees the object of their interest: a pair of cast-iron pans encasing something, held shut with heavy rocks atop them, which they’d placed right in the centre of the flames.

“Link’s been askin’ the Rito how to make bread on my behalf,” Rhodes says, as if a loaf of bird grain was something you threw together in an afternoon. “Turns out there’s a whole process to it. Y’know, like how you gotta wash the rice? With wheat you gotta beat the seed from the stalk, and sift the kernel from the chaff, and grind the kernels down real fine -- we used the blacksmith’s grindstone down at the waterwheel -- then mix that stuff with water and some, uh, something called a starter we’d been making with old potatoes, and then you gotta knead it real firm and leave it overnight to get bigger, to rise…”

He trails off when the look on Prima’s face confirms to him what an extraordinary waste of time that all sounded like, then shrugs and turns back to Link, who’s otherwise occupied poking at the pans with what appears to be a metal weapon stolen from a Lizalfos. Prima steps beside him to check what’s in the normal-Hatenan soup-pot above their whole cast-iron mess, scrapes the ring of spice residue back into the soup, helps herself to a bowl of the stuff and tops up the pot with rice and water and a pinch of salt.

It’s good, of course. It’s spicy and nutty and meaty, so much meatier than the soup from her youth -- if you’re brave enough, it’s easier to fulfill your obligation to the communal soup by hunting meat than to constantly stress about your dwindling share of rice -- and it goes down easy. Tastes a bit of crab, too. Someone must have gone down to the seaside that morning. Everyone’s looking a bit heartier these days, a bit more colourful, now that there’s always enough meat in the pot.

She eats, Rhodes watches, Link pokes. A quiet peace falls over them. Prima lingers, telling herself that she’s doing so to avoid all the chores waiting for her back at the Ton Pu. Link angles his head up to the moon and, seemingly judging that enough time has gone by, slides his Lizalfos blade under the pots and slides them out.

“Let it cool,” Rhodes murmurs, as if the calluses on Link’s palms tell that specific story, but Link pokes at the pots with his fingertips until they’ve cooled enough to grip; unlatches the hinge, flips the top pot open. Prima had been expecting a lump of Rhodes' inedible mush, but instead there’s something golden and fluffy in there, and it smells like nothing Prima had ever smelled before.

From one of his pouches Link produces a small knife, hands it to Rhodes.

“Your wheat,” Rhodes says, but takes the knife, because it’s understood: Link’s wheat, Rhodes' bread. He cuts a slice while Link roots around in his pack and produces a second item: a small rectangle of candlewax, which he cuts open to reveal a cloth soaked in what smells like Kakarikan rice wine vinegar, and unwraps to reveal a small pat of goat’s butter. Rhodes takes the butter and spreads it thick on each of three slices.

Prima realizes what’s happening when it’s already too late. “I haven’t done anything,” she says, a little embarrassed, but Rhodes presses the slice into her hands regardless.

“You stuck around.” He grins. “‘Sides, Link insists that bread tastes better with company.”

Link shrugs, takes his piece, and crams it into his mouth. Probably scalds his tongue from the sound he makes, but it must be edible if he’s that eager to eat it, and he dives in to cut himself another slice.

Prima takes a bite.

(It’s impossible to explain the taste of hot buttered bread to someone who’s never eaten it before. Consider Prima, whose great-great-grandmother was still a child when the Calamity drove the Hylians into their holes and hiding places, destroyed their roadways, devoured their trade routes, ended much of their old ways of life; whose great-grandmother was raised on stories of those machines that turned the burning fields into hunting grounds; whose grandmother assumed that the Zora’s Domain was a kingdom in a fairytale; whose mother aspired to become an innkeeper and nothing more. Prima was raised on one hundred years of fear and pragmatism and rice and salt, mended her own skirts, and never dared dream of what lay beyond Death Mountain.)

Bread, _Calamity_ , the taste of bread! Hot and moreish, the creamy taste of butter, the contrast of the hard crust and the soft interior; the sour, nutty smell; the way it melts on the tongue; the incomprehensible way it all comes together in one perfect little bite --

\-- _oh_ , Prima thinks, halfway through her second slice, as the three of them attack the loaf of bread with gusto: this is the taste of civilization. This is the taste of wheat that had meandered uninhibited south from Hebra, the taste of the leisure time one can put into threshing and winnowing and grinding and leavening and baking if you’re safe and well fed, the taste of a life lived with the certainty that tomorrow was something worth waiting for, that your children’s lives would be better than yours.

“Prima, you, uh. You okay?”

Aw, hell, she’s gotten all misty in the eyes. There goes her reputation.

Link springs for the soft bed and hot water, sloughs off a desert’s worth of dirt in the bath-barrel as Prima stands nearby with the excuse that he’s a guest who ought to have his towels handed to him. She tries to keep her mouth dry to save the taste of bread a little longer as he scrubs all the crud out of old wounds.

When he’s done he hoists himself out of the barrel and takes the offered towel, tucks it around his waist for a modicum of decency, though she appreciates that about him -- the cavalier, honest way he wears his nudity.

He saunters back towards the inn.

“Hey,” she says. Link turns to look at her. “Thanks for the bread.”

He nods and smiles. She opens her mouth and closes it again because there’s something she needs to say but she’s not quite sure how to say it, something like _I_ _have resigned myself to die where I was born, and I am not ashamed of that,_ something like _but I think I understand, now, that there must be places in this world as beautiful as the taste of bread_ , something like _if only you could you ease my phantom regret for one night_.

He beckons _come here_ with a bent index finger and she does. She knows the old song and dance that people do behind inns and barns in the middle of the night; she’s done it before, and she imagines that he has as well, but when he puts his hands on her hips and pulls her in tight she feels like a little girl discovering for the first time what a nice distraction another person can be.

“You --” she starts, and his face is very close and his eyes are very, very blue, and there is a smattering of freckles across his nose, and the feeling of his groin pressed against hers is life-affirming, and his breath is hot against her lips.

“-- Oh, Calamity,” she says, for she should know better. Link tilts his head and leans in and his lips are on hers. Coaxes her to open her mouth, sucks gently on her upper lip as he pulls away, then dives back in, warm and wet, making a breathy little sound at the back of his throat and pulling her in tight -- kisses her with the same quiet intensity that he approaches eating, and swordplay, every other visceral thing that travellers do, and encircled in him Prima can’t help but imagine the sight of him silhouetted by the sunrise over Tenoko Island, magnificent in the pale light of a world reborn each dawn.

They separate, and he pats her hip and gestures up to the window that marks his room.

“I can’t,” she says, catching her wits, swallowing thickly. “I barely know you, and I have chores to do. But, uh, thanks. That was nice.”

He sticks out his lower lip and nods _okay_ , and kisses her on the cheek, and Rhodes brings her a loaf of bread the next morning.

* * *

 

**03.**

The world is getting smaller. When Prima was little, everyone thought that the rockmen were mountain spirits spat out by the volcano -- now, not only is it common knowledge that you should take a left after the Trilby Valley if you intend to get to Goron Village, but any traveller worth their weight in rice could tell you how many Fireproof Elixirs to pack before making the climb.

Word filters south that Hudson, who had left to build a city in the Akkalas, has gotten married to a Gerudo; the boys start talking about paying him a visit, draw up maps and argue the virtues of cutting straight across the Phalian Highlands and across the Samasa Plains, or west through Kakariko Town, down the Sahasra Slope and up through the Millennio Sandbar, or whether it would be easiest to take the long way, the road through the Duelling Peaks, around Mercay Island and up the Ternio Trail -- or if the sea would be amenable to chartering a boat up the Afromsia Coast and hanging a left at Tingel Island.

Someone points out that the Rabia Plain would be an excellent shortcut if they could hold off the monsters long enough to build a bridge over the Rutala River into the Zodobon Highlands, which would link Tarrey to Hateno and Kakariko and even the Zora’s Domain in a day trip that hadn’t been possible for a century.

It’s a fool’s hope, but it’s hope nonetheless: that courage and a bit of elbow grease could make the world a little easier to live in -- and the bridge, like bread, turns from a dream into a possibility.

Link arrives on a blustery morning with the intention of stocking up on supplies before investigating the island east of Lurelin. Someone mentions the bridge and Link offers up wood and cord and a parlay with the Zora, then goes off to Eventide Island, and whatever dreams await him there.

Not even two days later word comes from Kakariko that the Zora agree to donate goods and labour to the bridge.

That’s the thing with Link -- the way he’ll go from Lurelin to Zora impossibly fast, the casual way he weaves impossible feats into conversation, the odd things that happen around him, the things he’s claimed to have seen -- the crest of the Duelling Peaks, the heart of the Lost Woods, the Death Mountain caldera, the top of the Great Plateau. Rumours circulate, traded hand-to-hand by strangers who’ve crossed his path: that he is a forest spirit, that he is an avatar of the Goddess, that he is the reincarnation of the old royal guard, that his sword speaks in a woman’s voice, that he’s a heartbreaker and a liar. Traysi’s report on his exploits in Gerudo is inconclusive. The Kakariko call him their saviour; the desert Hylians, who refuse to share their names and instead refer to themselves as Kohga’s Children, call him their doom; the rest of them just know him as a patient and generous stranger whose pack is always full of curiosities.

The world is stranger, too -- there are red beams of light that pierce the sky, and dragons that lope down each morning from Mount Hylia, basking on currents of warm air like great cats, going somewhere, going somewhere…

“...Kissed me behind the barn, there,” Koyin says one evening, as she and Prima knead dough for tomorrow’s breakfast. They’d built an oven for baking birdbread, and Sayge has recently announced the reinvention of pie. “Thought about askin’ him to bed, but then I realized -- I don’t think I love him. I think I love the _idea_ of him, y’know?”

Prima remembers the kiss, and the other kisses that followed. Link offers up his love freely and with enthusiasm, and it’s a nice way to spend a bit of time -- hell if he isn’t easy on the eyes -- but Koyin is right: there’s a certain excitement about a boy like that, but his big heart lives elsewhere, and he has things to do.

They knead and knead and then store the dough to leaven overnight, then she bids Koyin goodnight and makes back for the Great Ton Pu, only to catch the sight of the Firly Pond shrine glowing blue, and someone stumbles out.

It’s Link -- it must be Link.

Sensing something wrong, she picks up her skirts and hurries up the hill, catches him staggering across the bridge towards his house. She offers an arm and he takes it, and in the dark of night she can’t quite tell what has happened, but he is warm and slippery and smells acrid, of blood and iron and sweat, of burnt flesh and singed hair.

He keeps a small and neat house, and though she’s never been inside before, it seems fitting for him: sparsely furnished, well-lit, weapons on display. She barely has the capacity to process the sight of a Zora spear next to a Gerudo scimitar before he stumbles and slumps, like a sack of grain, limp in her arms.

He’s heavy. She tries to strip him of all his gear before dragging him up the stairs, but the sword on his back singes her fingers when she touches it, and something screams in her head, and she has a momentary vision of a woman hurtling down into the gaping maw of a terrible black beast -- so never mind that. Heaves the entirety of him up the stairs and manages, just barely, to shake off his stuff and get him onto his bed.

Yeah, it’s bad -- not that she needed a once-over to tell. His bright blue tunic is miraculously in one piece, but the rest of him is battered and bloody, lacerated, bruised, burnt. She rolls up the tunic and uncovers the massive circular welts the travellers call Guardians’ Bite.

“You’re an idiot,” she says. He’s lucid from the pain, shifting about and making weird little noises like a wounded animal. “Must have gotten these in Hyrule Field. What do you think you’re going to find in a place like that?”

He wasn’t in Hyrule Field: he was in _Hyrule Castle_. The realization gives her pause as she’s rooting around in his pack for bandages.

“Easiest way to disappoint your mama,” she mumbles. It’s a Hatenan saying as old as the sky, but he has something he has to do there, some promise he must keep more valuable than his own life.

He has bandages and ointment tucked next to a small collection of scales that send sparks of static electricity up her arm when she touches them, and she throws open the window and shouts down the hill for Reede to bring a skin of water, starts stripping Link’s clothing while she’s waiting.

There’s a strange picture hanging on his wall -- Link and a girl Hylian, a Rito, a Goron, a Zora, a Gerudo. All of them dressed in a little bit of blue frozen in the act of falling into one another. Some friends of Link’s, perhaps.

Reede brings water and a bowl of that night’s dinner, a pumpkin stew. He takes over cleaning and dressing Link’s wounds while Prima coaxes a few spoonfuls of soup into him; eventually Link blinks, bleary-eyed, then tries to sit up -- and, suddenly aware, flails out an arm as though he’s lost something.

“Sword’s on the ground right there,” Prima says, grasping one of his shoulders, holding him still as Reede wraps a bandage around his torso. “Map’s still on your belt. Everything else should still be in your pack, unless you dropped it outside while you stumbled here.”

His eyes flit to the sword, and then to the map, then down to his lap. Prima hands him the rest of the bowl. He sighs and lets his shoulders drop, but takes it and eats.

Eventually he’s done with the soup and all bandaged up and snoring gently in his bed. Reede packs the bandages back into Link’s bag and turns to Prima, looking weary.

“Might be best if you stay the night,” he says, as if Prima was thinking of leaving him alone.

“Tell Leop I'll be here,” she says, instead, and he nods and takes his leave.

Link glows a little blue while he sleeps, and the sword glows as well, and not for the first time does Prima recognize that she is a very tiny part of his very big story. He has things he must do and places he must go and he does not take anyone with him; and she thinks to the kiss behind the inn, and what Koyin had said; and she wonders if he’s ever loved something or someone quite as much as he loves the adventure he’s on, or if he even really loves the adventure he’s on, or if he’s doing this all out of some misattributed sense of duty or self-pity. She thinks about the way the tower by Lake Jarrah glows the same colour as him and his sword and his tunic. She thinks about the taste of bread. She thinks about the dirt ground into his fingernails. She thinks about the way he’d appeared one day on horseback and changed everything. She thinks about how he’s never spoken a single word, and yet his intentions are always clear.

She realizes that he’s awake, staring at her with those damn blue eyes, shivering. He’s lost a lot of blood and it shows in the grey tint in his skin, so she kicks off her shoes and smooths her skirts and blows out the candles and climbs into bed beside him. Throws an arm over him and pulls him in close, tucks his head under her chin, rubs his back until he’s fallen back asleep.

It’s absurd, it really is. The bed is tiny and she’s in her day clothes, holding this half-dead kid who smells of blood and pumpkin soup, and it goes without saying that he’ll be back in Hyrule Castle the next morning.

She dreams of bright bright blue in a dark dark room and someone telling her to wake up; and she has been waiting waiting waiting for so long; and he is telling her to go and save them, save them all; and then there is the man with the red eye -- but she is gone now, and the rain is coming, and the white wolf is waiting -- and It looks at him with Its mouth wide open and It laughs and It says _my hate never perishes, it is born anew_ , like the first day, like the blood moon --

\-- and then she’s in his bed in another dawn. Link is right where she left him, eyes closed and brow furrowed, curled up into her like some sort of animal. At least he’s still asleep. He’s also, from what she can tell, fully healed, bandages vanished. Something about that doesn’t sit right with her, and as the fuzz of the nightmare peels back a little she realizes she smells soil and spruce, the smell of the wild.

She blinks. There is green grass growing up from underneath the bed, a small deciduous tree, and -- she has only seen them in picture books -- a bevvy of Silent Princesses leeching pollen that dances lazily up into the shaft of sunlight slicing in through the open window. Something giggles in her ear in a child’s voice. When she turns to look there is no-one there. She sighs and closes her eyes and though she’s waiting for the dream to end, it is quite nice lying there in the woods in a stranger’s house holding him tight, warm and lazy and content, with nothing all that pressing to do.

When she wakes he’s gone, off to whatever it is he has to do.

 

* * *

 

**04.**

For years afterwards, people would talk about what happened in Hyrule Field that day, but Prima missed it. She’d been sitting in his house trying to piece together the dream of green grass before figuring she should probably get something to eat, and then people started screaming and the red beam of light to the northwest turned white-blue and then the calm midmorning sky went bright gold and then red-black like a Blood Moon, and then there was this awful screeching that rattled her right down to her ribcage, and then the sky went back to business as usual and so did everything else.

Rumour has it that Link’s out travelling with company, and that the wilds are safer than they’ve been in decades, that the spectre of the Calamity has left Hyrule Castle, and months pass without another Blood Moon.

“Hey,” Prima says to Koyin one evening, as they roll dough for fruit tarts.

“Yeah?”

“You ever think about travelling?”

“Travelling where?”

“Well.” Prima folds her dough over. “We could pack some bread and cheese and apples, and go west to the Duelling Peaks stables and see if they’ll lend us horses. Then we could go to Kakariko Village, I’ve heard that’s where Link learned to roll rice into balls and eat it with his hands. Then -- oh, I dunno. I’m feeling courageous. Let’s go anywhere.”

Some might say that the most important freedom is the freedom to leave. That’s why we cut doors into our walls, even though the world outside might be dangerous -- so that we always have somewhere to go. It's not about a deal, or a test, or a chance to fall in love, or fate. You leave safety behind and you might get devoured whole, but at least you had been free.

“Sure,” Koyin says. “Let’s go anywhere.”

**Author's Note:**

> (or: an excuse to talk about bread)
> 
> find me on [tumblr](http://kanthia.tumblr.com/)!


End file.
